Friday, 29 February 2008

We are living in an age of accelerating demand for air travel and these new terminals and international agreements are its fruits. But there are other, less palatable, fruits too. We got a taste of a growing backlash against the aviation industry thi...

Mr Annan's is a huge achievement, coming after 38 days in which he dedicated himself to the cause. Of course, it is not his alone: Jakaya Kikwete, the president of Tanzania who is chairman of the African Union, shares some of the credit – as do the b...

There is a temptation to smile at the Ruritanian nature of all this. But there is nothing funny about the decision of Europe's main election watchdog, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation, to pull out of monitoring the vote because of the r...

It may have sounded a very good idea in No 10. But the Government might have been warned by the collapse of the Soviet economy, which depended on numerical targets, strategies and sanctions. What has happened to primary education in England is not un...

Every day in the late Sixties, you heard something astonishing – or so it seems. The reality is somewhat different from the partial, highly dubious memories preserved in the aspic of nostalgia. In the psychedelic era, the airwaves were actually packe...

From the play's text, it seems likely that the quarrel over anti-Semitism began in Shakespeare's imagination in the mid-1590s. Traits of the stereotypical Jewish villain found (but also subverted) in Christopher Marlowe's play "
The Jew of Malta"fuse...

Somewhat excessive as that prediction may sound, it is clearly well on the way to being fulfilled, as emissions from aircraft show no sign whatsoever of being reduced, now or in the future, and the imminent, startling increase in flights which has be...

Exercise your wit, insight and maybe even a tad of news knowledge. In short, and just for fun, post your caption using the comment form below - and see other people's captions below that. We'll reproduce the best on our winners page at the beginni...

The recovery of assets from key criminals, including drug traffickers, has been fraught with problems. Performance targets have been regularly missed, leading to the dissolution of the Asset Recovery Agency and its work being subsumed into the Seriou...

The criticisms of the intensive testing regime imposed on children since 1997 are by now familiar. Few outside the Department for Education defend it. But the attacks on the national curriculum and centrally mandated teaching methods are less common....

The real eye-opener of The Jam Generation, though, was the identikit nature of most of the participants: Cameron; Nick Clegg; David Miliband – bright, articulate Oxbridge intellectuals all of them, each speaking in a near-identical accent (Cameron po...

But it is hard to find fault with the reasoning behind the media blackout in this country. The armed services took the decision last year that Harry could not serve in Iraq because he would present a trophy target. Yet he wanted to fight, so he could...

Such scepticism is misplaced. This week alone we have witnessed three striking examples of the power of the ethical consumer. At the beginning of the week we learned that the UK market for Fairtrade food products rose by 80 per cent last year. Then, ...